US midterm results result reveal dark arts of voter manipulation

US voters increasingly do not select their politicians. Politicians - and the cashed-up interests that run them - select their voters. Nick O'Malley reports on what the midterm election result reveals about the dark arts of disenfranchisement.

Nick O'Malley

Tuesday night was a horror show for the Democratic Party across the United States. It was not just that the party was clobbered in tough races it had already resigned itself to losing, it was the the collapse of its vote in strongholds like Maryland and Virginia.

But in the little northern state of Massachusetts there was some good news, despite the party losing the governor's mansion.

Capitol restructuring: Republicans won the majority of the US Senate for the first time in eight years. Photo: AFP

All nine Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives in Washington, DC, won. It was a string of victories that not only broke records – Democratic candidates in Massachusetts have now won 100 House races on the trot – it defied logic.

You might think this is the product of a brilliant state political machine, of candidates building on a record of strong local representation and canny prosecution of their opponent's policies.

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Nor can the trend be traced to a single cause, rather the two parties and their increasingly sophisticated machines are more effectively exploiting a raft of systemic failures.

What is extraordinary though is how little attention the widespread disenfranchisement of American voters has attracted in the days after the election.

To an outside observer it also reinforces how critical a handful of electoral regulations, institutions and traditions are in keeping elections fairer in Australia.

The heart of the problem in America is low voter turnout, which contributes not only to bad elections and campaigns, but to bad policy.

Without compulsory voting, much campaigning is necessarily devoted to convincing your supporters to actually show up on the day and cast a ballot, rather than on convincing swinging voters to back your ideas.

An attack on the right to vote is under way across the country through laws designed to make it more difficult to cast a ballot.

Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee

Strategists are aware that the easiest way to motivate someone to make the effort to vote is to scare them or infuriate them. It is far easier to tell voters that Barack Obama wants to allow Ebola-infected terrorists to cross the unguarded southern border rather than make a case against the Democratic Party's view of the role government.

This need to agitate base voters drives politicians of both parties to pander to their extremes. Carroll Doherty, the head of political research of the Pew Research organisation says increasingly in America those who turn up to vote are angrier and more partisan than the broader population.

Dividing the electorate into useful constituencies is not new in American politics. It is the basis of the so-called southern strategy, by which Republicans pandered to the racial fears of whites the post-civil rights south. It was used ruthlessly by the Republican strategist Karl Rove to help George W. Bush in 2004.

Rove recognised he needed to find away to energise conservatives on polling day. Ken Mehlman, Bush's campaign manager in 2004, told The Atlantic that to do so Rove had Republicans put anti-gay initiatives and referenda on various state ballots. The thinking was that conservative voters who were unexcited by Bush's "compassionate conservative" message would turn out to vote for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, and while in the booth would vote for his candidate.

When massaging the erogenous zones of key demographics is not enough to guarantee a victory, American politicians are increasingly turning to the complimentary tactic of suppressing voting by demographics that tend to support their opponents.

Republicans, who have learned that low voter turnout suits them, have particularly embraced this tactic.

It is made possible because each state sets its own voting regulations with little or no independent oversight.

A particularly popular voter suppression technique in recent years has been the introduction of voter identification laws.

Voter ID laws require people to present a photo identification card, the sort that poorer Americans are less likely to have, before casting their ballot.

The laws can be handily tailored to suit different constituencies. A transparent example of this was a law passed in Texas – and then blocked by an appeals court – that would have allowed people with National Rifle Association membership cards to vote, but not those with student cards.

"An attack on the right to vote is under way across the country through laws designed to make it more difficult to cast a ballot. While based in terms of voter fraud, these laws will actually have their greatest impact by limiting participation of African Americans, Latinos, Asians and the young," said Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee after the decision.

Since the poor, young people and minorities – those less likely to have ID – tend to favour Democrats, the impact of these laws is to hold down the Democratic vote.

Republicans generally insist that the goal of voter ID is designed to prevent fraud, but there is little evidence of voter fraud. A recent study by Justin Levitt, a professor at the Loyola University Law School, found 31 confirmed cases of voter fraud in about one billion ballots cast. There is ample evidence of mass disenfranchisement though. And occasionally Republican officials obliquely acknowledge this.

In 2012, Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai told a gathering of Republicans that their recently passed voter identification law would "allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania."

In 2011 alone, after the Republicans won control of many states in the 2010 midterms, 34 states introduced voter ID bills to require voters show a photo ID. Fourteen of those states already had voter ID laws, but legislators sought to make them stricter.

Turnout is also suppressed by reducing access to polling places. In the US elections are held on Tuesdays rather than on weekends. As a result employees with less control of their working lives – poorer workers who trend Democratic – find it harder to the get the polls.

African-Americans waited about twice as long to vote in the 2012 election as whites – 23 minutes compared to 12 minutes, according to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice. Whites who live in nearly all-white neighbourhoods waited only seven minutes to vote in 2012. The poorer and more black a voting district is, the longer the wait time. South Carolina's Richland County, home to 14 per cent of the state's African-American voters, forced some people to wait more than five hours to vote.

Expanding the voting period from one day to several weeks would boost turnout, but Republican-dominated states tend to restrict this. Florida, ruled by a Republican governor and Republican-dominated legislature, has fought hard to limit voting to just one day.

The 2012 election study showed that long lines in Florida, almost always in poorer areas, kept 49,000 people from voting. Thirty thousand of those votes would have been cast for Barack Obama. The former Republican Party chair in Florida, Jim Greer, told the Palm Beach Post that the point of limiting early voting is suppression of the Democratic vote.

"The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates. It's done for one reason and one reason only ... 'We've got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us'."

Voter turnout is generally lower at midterm elections, which lack the drama of presidential races. As Doherty explains, this too favours Republicans, because their constituencies – older, whiter, homeowners – are more likely to vote. This trend contributes to the recent seesawing effect in American elections – the 2008 surge for Obama, the 2010 Republican gains, Obama's re-election in 2012, the Democratic losses on Tuesday night.

And even those voters who make it to the polls in the US may find that there vote has been rendered irrelevant by gerrymandering, which brings us back to those nine Democratic wins in Massachusetts.

The Boston Gazette in Massachusetts created the term gerrymander in 1812 when governor Eldridge Gerry sought to hold his job by redrawing districts. When mapped the new districts looked, the newspaper wrote, like a salamander.

Without independent electoral commissions to contain them, the first order of business for many new governors in America is to redraw districts to cement their hold on power. The typical tactic is bundle all one's opponents into one or two seats they were going to win anyway, while spreading your own support across a majority of winnable districts.

Modern computer electoral mapping has made the process cheaper and even more effective.

Both parties excel at this dark art, though the Republican Party has virtually ensured its hold on the US House of Representatives until the next census in 2020 with the practice.

In 2012, Democratic candidates received about 1.2 million more votes nationally than Republican candidates, but the GOP controls almost 54 per cent of the seats in the current House because the districts were drawn to maximise the impact of every vote in conservative areas.

Republicans maintain control even in states where they were swamped by President Obama and the Democrats.

Obama won Pennsylvania by five percentage points, but Republicans control 13 of the state's 18 Congressional seats. We see similar results in Ohio and Virginia, both won by Obama, but the GOP holds 12 of the 16 seats from Ohio and eight of the 11 from Virginia.

The electoral advantages of holding office have become so overwhelming that it is increasingly difficult for American voters to remove incumbents of either party.

In 2013 the research outfit Public Policy Polling discovered that Congress had an approval rating of just 9 per cent. Shocked by the finding – and only partly in jest – the group then tested Congress's popularity against 26 specific items.

It found Congress was significantly less popular than lice (by 67 per cent to 19 per cent), colonoscopies, Genghis Khan and even France (46 to 37).

Despite this, since 1964 incumbents have won more than 80 pe rcent of their re-election campaigns in the House of Representatives and in some years over 95 per cent. Re-election rates in the Senate are not quite as high, but only in 1980 have incumbents won fewer than 60 percent of their campaigns since 1964. In 1990 and 2004, about 95 percent of incumbent Senators running for re-election triumphed.

It is clear that the thousands of races held across America were free and legal, but it is not so obvious any more that all American elections are fair.

Flushed with its success, the Republican Party has been quick to claim a mandate from its victories.

"The American people have made it clear they're not for Obamacare," the House Speaker, John Boehner on Thursday. "Ask all those Democrats who lost their elections Tuesday night." This is debatable. Despite relentless attacks on Obamacare by Republicans since 2010, the GOP fell silent issue this year as the new laws began to work and voters lost interest in the issue.

But as the dust settles it is estimated that only 83 million Americans turned out to vote, or around 36.6 percent of those eligible, down from 58 per cent during the 2012 presidential elections. It is worth noting that also in 2012 Afghanistan enjoyed 58 per cent turnout despite the threat of suicide bombs.

For American this was the lowest turnout since 1942, and that should be viewed as a problem, if not an embarrassment, by both parties.